ActiBlizz, I know you really are banking on leveraging facebook and RL social networking and stuff, but you are purposely crippling the useability of your service for absolutely NO benefit to the user. The ONLY people who benefit from forcing realIDs to use real names are ActiBlizz shareholders and executives.

It essentially locks a ton of people out of the service. A service you want to be successful. It can't be used for its intended goddamn purpose because using it opens up a personal security/privacy breach with no way to opt out except to not use the service at all. When it would be SO EASY to just plug that security hole so users could actually use the service freely.

Why didn't you instead just announce "there will be no cross-game communication available in battle.net for people you meet online".

Again, this ONLY hurts the end user and the success of the product's widespread use. So why is the real name being forced in there? Is it really just for facebook integration? Is that really so profitable that it's worth hamstringing the entire service until it's almost pointless? Why would you EVER do it this way??!??!

Yours in INCANDESCENT RAGE,

Hatch

(not my real name, which means that I can't use it as my battle.net handle without giving out my real name to everyone that my blogging persona wants to keep in touch with, thus destroying the purpose of the pseudonym entirely!)

PS: and I quote:

"You will also be able to see the first and last name of your Real ID friends and their Real ID friends."

Yep. If you friend someone with your Real IDs, anyone that other person EVER adds will be able to see YOUR personal information without any way for you to block it except drop that friend.

Why would you force real names on there when the system would be so much more useable and less [bleep]ing dangerous if you just let us opt out of displaying our real names?

Thanks God I'm not on Facebook. I'm an anti-social, way worse than Gevlon. This really doesn't bother me the slightest since I have no reason at all to use it. Sometimes it's such a blessing to be a loner.

I didn't want to have to update the post, but I just had an idea...the SC2 devs said 6 months ago that SC2 was ready for beta but there were "unexpected delays" of battle.net. Maybe this was it? Maybe they were about to push the thing out the door, then Activision came to them and said "we need you to make this deal with Facebook so we can make more money off this" and that delayed it?

Why would they be so adamant about real names with no given reason for that decision whatsoever if it weren't being forced on them by a contract or their activision overlords? None of the Blue posters seem to believe in the real name thing or have any desire to give an explanation for it.

What with DDO's paywall privacy breach, the dubious privacy management of Buzz and Facebook's determination to have our every detail in their database it's a bit of a grim time for those of us who value our privacy.